Chutzpah, Thy Name Is Joe Biden

On Larry King Live last night, Vice President Joe Biden said Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

If there was ever an Administration that had internalized the strategy of the Big Lie, it is the Obama Administration. Oddly enough, even the White House press corps came out of its worshipful stupor long enough to ask questions.

At the briefing today, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about Biden calling Iraq one of the great potential achievements of the Obama administration given that Biden had previously advocated that the country should be divided into thirds and split among Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis, and then-Sen. Obama opposing the surge of US troops that many experts argue helped bring stability that allowed the reconciliation process to continue.

In fact, in January 2007 then-Sen. Obama said that he was “not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Gibbs said the achievement was “putting what was broken back together and getting our troops home, which we intend to do in August of this year.”

A reporter pointed out that the Status of Forces Agreement to bring troops home was signed before the president took office.

Gibbs called that agreement “something I think that the political pressure that the president, as a then-candidate, helped to bring about.”

The fact is that the success we are seeing in Iraq is due solely to the moral courage of President Bush. Had he listened to Obama, Biden, or a lot of members of his own party for that matter, Iraq would be a balkanized pseudo-nation with various parts at war with each other and under the sway of Iran, Turkey, and Syria.

Then-Senator Obama relentlessly opposed the war as did then-Senator Joe Biden. Their actions gave aid and comfort al Qaeda and to the Iraqi insurgency. Without the cheap political grandstanding on the part of these two men, and many other like them, the war would have proceeded to where it is today in a much more expeditious manner.

Much of the blood shed by American troops in Iraq and Iraqi civilians after 2006 can be laid at the feet of those who opposed the war and gave hope to the insurgency that they could engineer another Vietnam-like victory. The fact that Biden could proclaim this as a triumph for the administration simply beggars the imagination. That Gibbs could claim that Obama opposing the surge made success possible simply shows the depths to which these people will sink.

But we need to record this day. This triumph, like the proverbial Dead Sea fruit, will turn to ashes in their mouths.

The expedited schedule of withdrawal from Iraq for the sole purpose of appeasing the lunatic fringe of the Democrat party and leaving our political ties to Iraq in the hands of a well established blunderer virtually guarantees that the recent uptick in violence will rise.

While the Administration was handed a golden opportunity to bring the Iraq War to the successful conclusion many of us have long said was possible, the cheap opportunism that is the hallmark of the Obama Administration virtually guarantees that before 2012 we will again be back to where we were in 2006-07. And we know Obama does not have the moral courage or political will of a man like President Bush.